So, a couple of days ago I received the entries for round 2 of the
Sling Ink Scribbling Slam, which I've started to look at. I'm looking forward to reading and judging the rest - the quality of the stories I saw for the first round was excellent.
And talking of round 1 and of excellent stories, I'm delighted that that round's winner,
Astrid Lowe, has agreed to let me publish her story, 'In Time' here on the blog.
Enjoy. It's a cracker!
***
In Time
By Astrid Lowe
Some things change.
Bucharest is still, like the dead rat in the middle of the road, ironed flat by passing cars.
A mongrel snores in the shade of the old wooden fence, neck across a rusty pipe on the pavement. Blood drips from her ears; the flies are thirsty. There’s perfect harmony: the desperate insects have opened her blood vessels, releasing an inexhaustible fountain of ruby pearls, and, tired of shaking her festooned ears, she has dozed off.
Whoever could, has escaped the relentless sun. The houses on both sides of the cobbled street have their blinds drawn. Thick old walls shelter their insides from the summer heat. There’s no-one in sight. A putrid smell lingers alongside honeysuckle scent. The air hardly twitches this Sunday afternoon.
Screams – like sharp cuts into dilated silence.
Two small dark silhouettes appear around the corner, zigzagging, bouncing off each other. They grow as they come closer, but not by much. The noise they bring grows more. The boys might be about four or five years old. But street age is hard to tell.
‘I’ll tell. I’ll tell Papa Ahmed. I’ll tell. You’ll see,’ shouts the smaller one, his hoarse smoker’s voice yet rougher when raised.
‘Whoaaaaaaa!’ the other one screams and pushes him against the wall with one hand. His other hand holds a tight grip around the neck of a small, transparent plastic bag with a sticky substance. His dark brown eyes spark fury.
The little one, back and palms against the crumbling house wall, stares straight back, his dusty face marked by traces of sweat, perhaps tears. His hair is the colour of ripe wheat – rare for this part of the world, even more unusual for a street kid. The taller boy is black-haired, dark, like most of them. Both their naked bodies have the same colouring: a mix of sun-kissed and dust-beaten.
‘Shhh. Quiet there! Take it somewhere else, or I’ll come and show you,’ a man’s voice permeates through a set of blinds. It’s afternoon nap time in any respectable home.
The boys run off with small, fast steps, like a couple of frightened rats. As they pass the dog’s blood-sprinkled spot, she lifts her head and makes a sound, something between an almost inaudible growl and a deep sigh. The whiff of
aurolac must have tickled her nostrils.
They stop at the next corner, panting.
‘Iani, is he coming?’ the blond one asks, his green eyes widened, dark.
The black-haired one looks around the corner. ‘No-one’s coming, silly.’ He works up to a forceful spit onto the pavement, puts his arm around the little one and leads him away. ‘Now be quiet. Listen: it’s the yellow house at the end. The old baba is deaf. We climb through the window.’
A smile ripples across the little one’s face.
The end of town is the end of the world, where the city stops and the fields start. It’s where the caravans and the barefoot people are. Where they moved to when their houses were pulled down brick by brick, ironed flat into the ground. Here, kids gather to watch passers-by. There rarely are passers-by.
The evenings are chilly now. The kids feed the fire like a pet. They can’t leave it alone; they poke it with sticks and laugh when the flames bite back. A couple of older boys teach the others alba-neagra, the shell-game. Voices spread through the air, tangled like loose balls of thread.
‘Iani,’ a boy limps out of the surrounding dark and pulls one of them by the hem of his washed-out shirt, ‘Iani, can’t you hear? Papa Ahmed is calling.’
‘I’m coming.’ But Iani’s dark brown eyes can’t let go of the shells.
‘Now! He’s in a bad mood.’
Iani gets up and runs to the largest caravan, the one with plastic lions framing its light-flooded door.
‘Papa Ahmed?’ he calls from the steps.
‘Come, Iani, come in,’ a sandpaper voice calls.
The voice comes from the moustache-shadowed lips of a fleshy man with piercing eyes. His greasy hair is black like the crow’s feather. He slouches on a roughed-up bed with vivid flower-patterns, abundantly covered in cushions. A beautiful young girl sits on the floor, playing with a naked baby. Her orange-coloured Gypsy skirt competes with the bedspread.
‘Iani, come here. Come to Papa Ahmed,’ the man softens his voice.
Iani hesitates, but finally takes a few steps closer.
‘I keep ya like ma own,’ the man says, ‘you know that, Iani. You know how much I do for all of ya, don’t ya?’
Iani’s eyes follow a fly running along Papa Ahmed’s arm. He opens his mouth, but no words come out. He nods, with his mouth still open.
‘I’d kill for ma kids.’ The man’s face turns red.
Iani takes a sudden step backwards. He struggles to regain his balance.
‘Iani, tell me why,’ Papa Ahmed’s voice is trembling. He has tears in his eyes. ‘Why d’ya do this to me?’
‘Papa Ahmed, it’s not true, if someone said something, they lied,’ Iani says.
‘They? They are good kids. They bring in the dosh, every day. Iani, why d’ya betray me? Two whole weeks ya didn’t bring nothing back.’
‘Papa Ahmed, I swear, they attacked me. I lost all money, I swear. On my life, Papa Ahmed.’
‘Iani, Iani…’
‘Please, Papa Ahmed… I swear…’
Silence.
The baby cries. Iani looks over his shoulder, searching for the door.
‘I warned ya last week.’ The man stands up with a big sigh and smacks Iani. His voice escalates into a scream. ‘Now go, and don’t come back!’
The metro always smells bad. The pack of street kids smells worse. They parade through, all along the wagon. Their begging sounds like a threat. Their eyes are those of hungry wolves. People look away.
A granny-faced, white-haired woman holds a little girl’s hand. The girl wears a candy-pink hat. Matching hand-knitted mittens peek out from the sleeves of her thick, heavy winter coat.
She looks at the street kids as they walk through. People step out of their way. The boys aren’t as tall as her, but their faces have that old, serious expression she’s seen on her grandma’s face when she does grown-up things.
‘Whoaaaaaaa!’ A scream splits the bystanders even further towards the wagon walls.
The boys let him pass. His dark brown eyes spark fury. The girl stares at the shades of purple in the bruise under his eye, so much she doesn’t even notice that he is stark naked. His hand is in a tight grip around a small, see-through plastic bag, with a few coins and something sticky.
He lifts it to his mouth and breathes inside it, just like an oxygen mask. It swells and collapses again, as if alive, breathing for itself. The boy looks around, aware of his momentary power, ‘Whoaaaaaaa!’ and steps towards a couple, who retreat immediately. His loud laughter melts into the screeching of the train brakes.
The metro stops. He walks out.
‘Iani, wait,’ the voice of a smaller, blond boy, emerges from the crowd of street kids, in an oversized stripy dressing gown, barefoot. Between the warning beep and the doors gliding shut, he follows Iani into the darkness: December days end long before their time.
They walk, in through the sewers at Piata Amzei, into their hot, crowded shelter. It’s too dark in here to count how many they are. The kids feel at home, reassured, when the rats run over their bodies while they sleep. Crowds of cockroaches feel like cold running water on the skin. Most creatures thrive in here. Only the kids stop growing.
They’ll have aurolac for breakfast.
Piata Amzei wakes up to a new day. The last shy patches of snow have melted, the winter duvet is gone. Like the breakfast tray brought to bed by a thoughtful lover, the Turkish bread shop spreads the scent of fine bread into the air – baguettes, braided bread, flat bread with sesame seeds and more. It makes passers-by dizzy and leaves their mouths watering. There’s some movement inside the Scala Café, soon to be opened, its centrepiece a steaming espresso machine, croissants piled up in a basket next to it.
A street kid walks between the long rows of concrete market tables, suspiciously observed by peach-cheeked peasant women wearing thick black tights, thick black skirts, coats and headscarves while they lay out eggs and meat.
‘Hands off,’ one of them hisses when the boy comes too close to her table.
‘Don’t you have a heart?’ the one next to her jumps. ‘Come here, boy,’ she calls, ‘here’s a piece of bread and some pork rind.’
He takes them and runs away.
At the back of the market, a pack of street dogs surround him, barking. They’re all yellow and look identical, as if they were cloned.
Young market traders in their blue jeans have a break from laying out their evenly-sized Dutch greenhouse tomatoes and give each other a nudge to observe the show. The boy cradles the food at his chest. He is only a little taller than the dogs. They come closer to deafen him with threats until he drops the food.
The market buzzes like a beehive. It’s the first of March, the celebration of the beginning of spring. The old woman at the end of the market sells little bunches of snowdrops. The boy walks past. His dark brown eyes spark fury.
You can’t recognise him by that. It could be any of them.
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